> if we did get chineese support, how would you put
> it in filenames?

Guess this is for renaming files.

I think this is a relatively rare operation. And if
you weren't able to type in a Chinese filename, it
wouldn't deter people from using the system. Getting
id3 tags and filenames is (imho) the most important
piece. And that works.

Most of the current users are bilingual and none of
them have actually requested a way of entering
characters on the Archos.

To answer in the spirit of your question. Adding a way
of entering characters is perfectly feasible. Albeit
at the cost of using some extra memory for tables.

There are multiple ways of tackling this problem and
different users have different preferred methods.

If you think about it, it is the same problem as
looking up a Chinese character in a dictionary.

Here is one common method (slightly simplified for
explanation). If I want to type in the characters for
"Northern" and "Capital" using my English keyboard, I
type "bei" followed by "jing".

This works because "bei" is the pronunciation for
"Northern" in Mandarin, and "jing" is the
pronunciation for "Capital". Tokyo in Mandarin is
Eastern Captial so I'd type dongjing.

There are other systems which analyses the graphical
elements and assigns some code to the constituents.
For example the character for "fruit" has a ChangJie
code of CD.

Both these methods can be mapped into the English
alphabet. Pretty handy really. In programming terms
it's just a case of adding a table lookup.